DeMont: Dalhousie made big news in 2015 for all the wrong reasons

I tried for weeks to get an interview with Richard Florizone, the president of Dalhousie University. But Christmas is a busy time for university presidents, and his schedule couldn’t accommodate a sit-down before the deadline for this column.

I accept that. I also know that if I were in his shoes, I would want to look ahead to 2016, not be reminded of what happened in the last 12 months.

Let me put it this way: When our estimable web editors sat down and calculated what stories got the most traffic during the last year, the top one was about the threat of an impending snow storm — understandable during the deep freeze of 2014-15 — while No. 2 was a story about a man arrested with 51 live turtles in his pants because, well, it’s a story about someone who stuffed 51 live turtles down his drawers.

By comparison, three stories related to Dalhousie found their way into our top 20.

Alas, none were about the good things that happened at the Halifax school during the year: the fact that for a second consecutive year, a Dalhousie researcher, chemist Axel Becke, won the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s highest award for research, or that last year’s Nobel Prize in physics was won by a Dal alumnus, Arthur McDonald, who helped the world better understand neutrinos, which, I gather, are some of the universe’s fundamental building blocks.

Alas, when Dal made big news in 2015, it was for the wrong reasons.

Remember the Dalhousie 13, also known as the Gentlemen’s Club, those fourth-year male dental students who became a national symbol of misogyny after a series of Facebook posts that made degrading and sexually violent comments about female classmates surfaced?

An exclusive interview with Ryan Millet, one of the members of the Facebook group, ranked No. 15 on our list.

That story wasn’t even as heavily viewed as the one broken two months later, also by colleague Frances Willick, about another sex scandal back in 2014 allegedly involving Dal students that also came to light when it made it onto the Internet. It ranked 13th among every single story we ran in 2015.

That’s seven places better than our story about an alleged drug deal that went tragically wrong on the edge of campus, leaving a 22-year-old physics student dead and another young man, who had been about to enter Dalhousie medical school, charged with his murder.

Indeed, Dal’s list of woes seemed long in 2015. In September, another medical student, who was said to have confided to a psychiatrist that he planned to get a gun and kill 10 to 20 people before turning the gun on himself, was suspended after allegedly threatening to stab an associate dean at the school, as well as her daughter.

Just weeks ago, an international student at Dalhousie died of alcohol poisoning.

In fairness, the latter, though beyond tragic, could happen anywhere at any time.

Dal’s annus horribilis, in part, has been about timing — a series of unfortunate events coming together during what must have been one long year for the administration.

Dalhousie’s public relations department pointed me toward the long list of things the school has done in response to the slew of reports it ordered on the scandals, the most noteworthy being a task force chaired by legal scholar Constance Backhouse that made 39 recommendations aimed at improving the environment at the dental school.

All of which is great, but what I particularly wanted to know was what all this buzz meant to the university itself. So I just walked over to the all-but-empty campus — an eerie place during Christmas break — stepped inside the lobby of the Killam Memorial Library and asked anybody I could find what they thought.

An engineering student who would only call himself Mohmid told me not to worry because the administration was “still dealing with it.” But Greg Mehdiyev, another student in the same faculty, wondered whether the bad press would hurt future applications.

“In a sense, the damage has been done,” said Laura Hadley, 26, who also studied engineering at Dal and now works in the school’s finance department.

A professor, who wanted to remain anonymous because she sits on one of the working groups that materialized in response to the scandals, said time is of the essence, and unless concrete actions are taken in the first few months of 2016, it will be hard to convince the world that the administration is serious about real change.

On that point, there was no disagreement from Timothy Krahn, a researcher at Novel Tech Ethics, a Dalhousie-affiliated think-tank that considers cross-disciplinary ethical questions. He said the dentistry situation is emblematic of a “systemic problem” and stressed that the issue is not Dal’s reputation, but whether it “has the reputation that it deserves.”

He’s an ethicist. Ed McHugh, who I called when the library closed, is on the business faculty at Nova Scotia Community College and also teaches marketing and management part time at Dalhousie. He looks at things from a more pragmatic angle.

“There’s an old adage that all publicity is good publicity,” McHugh said.

“Well, that’s just not true. Dal has had a hard year.”

He’s surprised enrolment has been unaffected by all the bad news, which Dal, by its own admission, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to contain.

But he’d be startled if fundraising efforts don’t suffer.

“I’m sure the president has received lots of correspondence from alumni and the business community unhappy about all the publicity it’s gotten,” McHugh said.

One thing he knows for certain. After a year like the last one, Dalhousie can’t afford another PR hit. If Dal’s in the news, it better be for the right reasons.